Advances in microprocessor and related technologies have led to wide spread deployment and adoption of computing devices. Computing powers that used to be available only in very expensive main frame computers requiring conditioned operating environment, are now available in many personal computing devices. Their form factors vary from desktop, laptop, palm sized, and so forth. A number of these computing devices are packaged as “special purpose” devices, such set-top boxes, entertainment control centers, personal digital assistants (PDA), pagers, text messengers, and wireless mobile phones.
Concurrently, advances in networking, telecommunication and related technologies, in particular, in the area of wireless networking/communication, have led to increased connectivity between computing devices, over local, private, wide area, and/or public networks. Of particular notoriety is the Internet.
Together, these and other related factors have contributed to the availability of rich multi-media content available from a variety of media servers, for consumption on a variety of media rendering devices. Recently, this trend of connected consumption of high quality media content has made particular significant advances in the home operating environment.
To facilitate interchangeability and ease of employment of a wide range of rich media rendering devices to render media contents, the UPnP A/V Architecture Specification and a number of related specifications are being developed by the members of the UPnP Forum. These specifications specify the protocol and services to be supported by the UPnP A/V Media Server providing media contents, and the UPnP A/V Media Renderers which render the provided media contents, and the control point which controls the cooperation between the complying media servers and the complying media renderers.
However, these specifications do not specify the user interface through which the media contents, the complying servers and renderers are to be made visible to the users at the control points, and the user interface through which their operations are to be controlled.
Thus, an approach, preferably a user friendly one, for a user at a UPnP control point to discern the media contents available from the various UPnP media severs, and the various UPnP media renderers present in a network domain, and to control their operations to consume the available media content is desired.